THERE are so many places on Earth that are thought to be cursed or have some form of strange or unique activity going on around them that either keeps people away or wanting to know more about.

There is such a place in Mexico known as the “Zone of silence”. Now this by no means refers to a warning or a place where one is supposed to be quiet. It is quite the opposite. The place is quiet in the sense that radio equipment and signals either do not work or are extremely weak. It is an area where walkie-talkies also do not work.

Can you guess the reason? Again as with all mysteries and enigmas, it is not one but quite a few — the unexplained disturbances with equipment and humans as well. One of these areas is Napoleon’s first place of exile, an island in the Mediterranean, called Elba. Then there is a location in Mt Stredohori, Czechoslovakia, where some kind of force is supposed to drain cars of engine power on a stretch of 75 feet on a road.

But here, we are discussing “zona del silencio” Mexico’s magical and puzzling area. Situated four hundred miles from El Paso, Texas, this region is as weird as they come. As if deserts are not intriguing enough with their unending landscape and strange emptiness, this particular area kills radio and television signals and even has ET roaming around allegedly! All these strange things have not started to happen just recently but have been going on from at least the mid-nineteenth century, some farmers who had dared to settle there and make a living found “hot pebbles” falling from above. But the place became known as mysterious when an aviator, Francisco Sarabia reported that his radio stopped functioning over the area. This made him the first known victim of the ‘Zone of silence’.

But it publicly became famous in 1970 when ‘Athena’, an American missile that was fired from the White Sands Missile Base, lost its intended course and came into the Zone and crashed there. Then some years later some part from the Apollo Project broke over the region. This was enough as far as the United States’ military was concerned. An investigation team was duly sent to look into the natural or ‘unnatural’ properties of this place.

The first person from outside the region to discover the strange phenomenon going on in this place was an engineer, Harry de la Pena. There is a small community of people that have lived 25 miles away, known as Ceballos Durango, from the starting point of this area near an ancient watering hole. The visibly vast and flat ground has many thorny desert bushes and poisonous snakes just like any other desert. The engineer and his team could not communicate with each other as their walkie-talkies would not work and portable radios gave extremely weak signals. The curious nature of this place attracted scientists from all over the globe who visited the research facility built there called ‘The Biosphere”. The interesting name is due to the fact that millions of years ago, the zone was under water.

Many UFO’s have been reported here, close encounters of the third kind some have people claim to have not only seen so-called ET and friends but also spoken to them! How’s that for bizarre?

Old people, who resided near here, still remembered weird and unusual human-like creatures seen around the area. But there are some cases, which have been officially reported, and we shall look into those.

Ernesto and Josefina Diaz drove there in their new Ford pickup on October 13, 1975. Their purpose was to look for fossils and unusual rocks, which are found all over the place. They noticed the coming of a desert rainstorm and decided to pack up and leave. But the storm caught up with them and their van got stuck in a swamp. While they were desperately trying to get their van out of the rain and mud filled swamp, strangers came up to them waving and wanting to help. They were unusually tall and were wearing yellow raincoats. The couple stayed in the car while the two unique-looking men pushed their van out of the quicksand. When the husband got out to thank them, they had disappeared. Yes, gone in seconds without any surface evidence that they had been there.

Then there were two ranchers in the area actually saw a vehicle hovering above and changing colours. Now hold your breath! They claim they saw two humanoid beings come out of the vehicle and were glowing strangely. They got so scared that they runaway as fast as they could. Scientifically speaking, the area has a lot of magnetite deposits which is the reason given for the signals not working. In fact, a meteorite found here has been dated to before our Solar System even formed six billion years ago.

The meteorite is estimated to be 13 billion years old. But what about the alleged ET encounters? Maybe one of us can sneak into ‘the biosphere’ and see what’s happening there.